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It's hard for US mobile phone providers to compete with the lines of China Mobile and China Unicom (the #2 in China, afaik there are only two, thanks to state regulations). China Mobile has over half a billion subscribers - that's more than the entire US population. China has the advantage in numbers.

Yes, my formulation was silly.
I just hoped that people who say "This comes from evil communist China! It must be stopped !" would just work at making "great freedom-loving America" better.
But yeah, silly reaction to a silly comment. Sorry about that.

I'm the submitter. I'm American. The submission wasn't edited at all and I don't think I put a negative spin on it.

I even omitted some things like China Mobile being a state-controlled and state-owned company. But you can find that int he linked Wikipedia article. The company has been terrible with it's move to 3G. And, as a telecommunications company with 570 million customers, it's probably done a lot of harm as well as a lot of good. The most xenophobic statement you'll get from me is that it's a Chinese company so there's probably a lot of corruption at all levels. And that's not to say that there isn't corruption in the lobbyists of the American equivalent but I'm guessing the customers have even less rights when it comes to dealing with a state-controlled massive corporation.

So there's that but, you know, regardless of whether or not they're a member of the Linux Foundation, that's going to persist. If the Linux Foundation refused their entry (and, come on, Google and HP are in there so ethics like privacy aren't huge concern) I doubt China Mobile would break down and clean up just so they could get in. But now that they're in, maybe they can offer better service to customers? They're definitely paying dues to the Linux Foundation so unless you see that as 'blood money' it's a really good thing. It's good for us, it's good for the Linux community, it's good for people who want cheaper mobile phones and it's good for the people of China.

Getting the evilest of the evil to use Linux is a net positive for everyone involved. The only people who lose are the companies that make money off of everyone by selling a cash cow operating system like Windows hammered down into some sort of Frankenstein mobile operating system.

bla bla communism

Ha. I wish. If China were truly Communist without social classes, the bulk of the people would be treated a whole lot better and the system would either collapse or work properly for the first time Communism has been put into practice. Instead you've got some sort of hybrid closer to socialism than the United States is that keeps itself working by slowly implementing more and more capitalism. I still can't understand how people can call China "Communist" when the income, living conditions and rights of a rice farmer in BFE greater China is not even comparable to a banker in downtown Beijing.

I think this is just another sign that the year of Linux on the desktop is a dead dream but the year of Linux in the server farm and the year of Linux on the mobile device are already here.

"Ha. I wish. If China were truly Communist without social classes, the bulk of the people would be treated a whole lot better and the system would either collapse or work properly for the first time Communism has been put into practice. Instead you've got some sort of hybrid closer to socialism than the United States is that keeps itself working by slowly implementing more and more capitalism. I still can't understand how people can call China "Communist" when the income, living conditions and rights of a r

State capitalism has viewed the efforts of a theocracy to work with Nokia Siemens in catching/tracking dissidents and other NGO funded protesters.
Much better to grow and be part of any phone system than have to request outside help on your own phone network.
If the gov is part of the formation of any new phone system, the phone system is part of the gov.
A NSA Room 641A in your pocket. No need for sloppy push upgrades or requests outside the country. No Costas Tsalikidis, Adamo Bove style telco software

A capitalist society believes in survival of the fittest, world trade organisation, globalisation. They are against protection of local businesses. This all runs fine for the megacorps until everything crashes worldwide. Suddenly the companies that were against protection and developing local markets require bailout from the government. Thankfully the capitalistic government is happy to oblige and the taxpayer has to pay to keep this megacorps afloat after they manage to destroy themse

However there is such a thing as "red flag Linux" or so - a Chinese state-initiated, localised distribution. No idea how much it's used as I'm used to seeing Windows all over the place.

Open Source is pretty communist in a way: open for everyone, free to go around and for all to use. But the main reason China and many other countries in the world outside US (e.g. India, Russia, Brazil) are supporting Linux or one of it's varieties is to become independent f

I don't care who joins the Linux foundation and who doesn't, as long as more corporations are supported OSS in some way. The Windows monopoly needs to end, even if Google develops a Linux based distro and starts selling it for money (Though I don't wish for this to happen)

All the excuses of hardware-compatibility and user-friendliness has been long gone. For example in my very own experience where I had to run a PCMCIA card via a PCI-PCMCIA adapter on my desktop, it took me 3 days to find a solution in Wind

The interesting thing is that China Mobile is supposedly interested in the MeeGo project. A third party to join Nokia and Intel, and a mobile carrier at that, will furthur enhance MeeGo. Also, tellingly, the already have their own appstore, and Nokia seems to have partnered with them on Ovi, in this regard.

This might as well prove 2011 to be the year of Linux on mobile phones, if not desktops.

And I hope it's not going to be replaced by a Linux monopoly - as at the moment, the serious choices are Linux and Windows for OS. Even in mobile (Chrome OS and Android are Linux derivatives, and Symbian is dying if not dead).

More like the current web browser market: basically WebKit, IE, Mozilla (I forgot it's engine's name). Three html kits that are packed in various shells. IE still a bit big at some 60-70%, Webkit should grow more. Nicely fragmented, requiring attention to standards, and switching beco

I thought that the serious choices were Windows or OSX. At least many games and professional apps are being ported to OSX these days. There are a few geeky engineering type apps that run on Linux sure, but the "serious choices" for your average person are only Windows or OSX.

(I use Ubuntu at both work and home btw - my work is mostly web development, and I currently do all my gaming on consoles)

And this discussion is not about the average Joe, it's a level higher. Corporate choices, government work, computer/phone manufacturers. The ones that decide what Average Joe can choose from later. And Joe generally chooses "a PC" or "an Apple". And on top of that China Mobile is definitely not in the desktop computer market.

The problem of OSX, just like iOS, is that it's restricted. Yes on one hand it's a big player, some 5% or so for OSX,

I don't think iOS counts as a "niche" player really. The iPad is a bit of a niche market, but the iPhone is very, very big. Yes, iOS not an option for non Apple manufacturers, but it is an option for end users, and that's all that really matters.

I wouldn't get an iPhone myself, but more and more of our employees are getting iPhones instead of Blackberrys, Windows or Nokia etc phones.

Considering the developing model and community orientation (even in corporations) of Linux and variants, a Linux monopoly won't be even close to as terrible as Windows'. As a matter of fact, I would rather expect the OSS developers to work even harder in making their code more secure and stable when more users are migrating.

A Linux monopoly would be fundamentally different than a proprietary software (OSX or Windows) monopoly. A monopoly is only bad when it leads to lock-in and abuse of customers by companies charging a monopoly profit. This happened with Windows where Microsoft was convicted of abuse of their monopoly (not for having a monopoly).

However, it would be hard to implement customer lock-in with Linux since the software is all open source and the file formats for data are all open source. Any attempt to lock-in c

Microsoft's lock-in isn't the Windows platform as such, it's their applications. Most notable IE6 with all it's proprietary extensions (see regular/. stories on how companies just can't retire it), and MS Office's file formats. That's what keeps people stuck to Windows. And as a result the many other software applications that are Windows-only.

Symbian can hardly be called dead as more phones ship with Symbian than with any other phone OS... But if you're right and it really is dead, then that's bad news, because then Symbian phones are zombies. And there are a lot of them. And people are holding them against their head. Braaaains....

If you're right, then we'd better start stocking up various phone zombie eradication tools, such as full glasses of beer (demise of many a mobile phone).

According to this [slashdot.org] story, Symbian may not be dead yet (and of course phones with it installed will continue to be sold for the time being), but the future doesn't seem too bright.

Indeed yesterday looking for a new phone for myself I do recall having seen Symbian running Nokia's on display next to Android running Nokia's. Not sure though I am primarily interested in Android not Symbian, and those Nokias were out of my budget so didn't pay too close attention.

even if Google develops a Linux based distro and starts selling it for money (Though I don't wish for this to happen)

Android, or ChromeOS?

(okay, so one could theoretically build the base OS themselves, but when you add-in all of the proprietary apps google layers on top of the OS, and add in the fact that most people buy a new handset that comes with Android pre-installed, for the end user it's pretty close to Google selling [a distro] for money)

Just like all other technology ventures that have gone to China, the chinese are just going to infringe on the innovation from the western world's Linux technology and copy it without payi- oh I see what you did there.

but athe Chinese-controlled entity (read: all of them) submits code to the kernel, it better be not just put under a microscope, but sent through a freaking MRI. Trust but verify? No; just verify three or four times.

I know that most of my comments here do not get any traction. That is why I have not posted here in so long. I know that for this comment I might be modded as a troll or something like that. But I have been thinking for some time about liberated software in closed communist like countries for some time. I think it was N. Korea doing their own GNU+Linux that got me thinking more about the fact that for as much as we GNU geeks like to talk about Libre and the power of free speech given by FREEsoftware, I do n